Muted Protests Shout For Reform

Chinese Students Keep Tiananmen Square Spirit Alive

June 02, 1992|By Uli Schmetzer, Chicago Tribune.

BEIJING — Fragments of shattered bottles on campus walkways and whispered reports of wall posters ripped down remain quiet proof this week that the fight for democratic reform has not died out in communist China.

But neither has the government`s determination to keep down the opposition it tried to crush with tanks and guns around Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, after protests by uncounted numbers of pro-democracy Chinese.

The authorities continue to maintain that only 36 people died in the brutal repression three years ago this Thursday. Unofficial estimates put the figure much higher, in the hundreds or even thousands, but no one knows for sure.

However many victims there were, there can be no open mourning for them on Beijing`s tightly controlled campuses. Reform-minded students ventilate their frustrations by breaking bottles, a symbolic gesture against patriarch Deng Xiaoping, whose second name can be translated as ``little bottle.``

Several posters with simple messages-``More democracy in China`` or ``Do not forget June 4``-were torn down by security men this month. Campus authorities banned public meetings and warned that anyone making speeches or showing ``signs of disrespect`` would be expelled.

``There is not much we can do,`` said a senior economics student at Beijing University, ``but the broken bottles all over the campus and torn posters show some kind of movement is alive. And that`s important.``

Red flags fluttered as usual this week over Tiananmen Square and from the rooftops of the adjacent Great Hall of the People, from which army snipers fired on the protesters. On Monday, buses were parked on the square, as if the authorities wanted to make certain the vast space was filled with machines rather than people.

From the ancient wall of the Forbidden City, Mao Tse-tung`s huge portrait stared across the Square through jets of rising water from new fountains and flower beds. The original portrait, replaced after it was splattered with egg yolk and ink in 1989, was cleaned last week for the theme festivities created each year at this time to keep the square occupied.

Last year it was the Week of the Drivers. This year it is a week dedicated to children.

China`s formidable security apparatus, beefed up and empowered with a sweeping mandate after 1989, has virtually ensured students are bottled up in their campuses under close scrutiny while known dissidents are either under house arrest or have been isolated.

Paramilitary police have set up nightly roadblocks around the capital for random checks on cyclists and motorists. Anyone entering one of Beijing`s 83 campuses and colleges must leave some form of official identification at the gate. Students say the grounds are ``crawling`` with plainclothes agents.

Western diplomats feel the precautions illustrate how badly the Chinese hierarchy was frightened by the events of 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and how determined it is to make sure this week that no stray spark rekindles the dissident bonfires of the Beijing Spring.

Last weekend, journalist Dai Qing, 50, was left stranded in the transit lounge of Hong Kong airport when China officials ruled she could not come home from the United States, where she had been studying at Harvard University under a Nieman fellowship since February.

Dai, a former Communist party member, became one of the government`s most outspoken critics after the 1989 crackdown. She was seized and held incommunicado for several days last November in Beijing to keep her from a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

While Dai was in Hong Kong, 4,000 demonstrators marched on the Xinhua news agency, Beijing`s de facto embassy in the British colony, to deposit a wreath and a symbolic coffin in memory of those who died near Tiananmen.

The crowd chanted anticommunist slogans and clashed with police who had been ordered to stop them. Hong Kong`s authorities are careful these days not to upset Beijing; in 1997, China is scheduled to incorporate the colony and its 5.9 million people.

In recent weeks foreign journalists, who often are accused by Chinese officials of fomenting unrest with reports of human rights abuses and budding opposition, have been harassed or warned that their activities violate the Chinese code of conduct. That code includes, among other restrictions, a requirement for advance official approval for interviews with any Chinese citizen.

In an attempt to counter claims that students in jail have been tortured and manhandled, officials circulated photos of Wang Dan and Wei Jingsheng, both arrested during the 1989 uprising. The photos, showing them playing table tennis, were meant to imply they had not been mistreated.

But on Sunday, the New York-based human rights organization Asia Watch issued a report that detailed systematic torture and persecution of pro-democracy inmates in jails and labor camps.

Such reports are not uncommon. Chinese authorities dismiss them as exaggerations by students who manage to go abroad and seek celebrity status with horror tales about their alleged suffering.

China still refuses, however, to allow the International Red Cross or human rights organization to visit labor camps and jails.